SWTOR Dantooine Incursion Review (Game Update 5.10.3)

Review and a few remarks from Vulkk about The Dantooine Incursion, SWTOR’s game update 5.10.3, which brings a new event and a few surprises!

Game Update 5.10.3 The Dantooine Incursion to Star Wars: The Old Republic brought a few unexpected surprises on top of its already announced and widely advertised features. This article serves both as a review of the update and an opportunity for me to share a few personal remarks about the story, the event, BioWare’s timing and future plans

Usually I have a “Everything you need to know” article about each major update to Star Wars: The Old Republic, shortly before it goes live and keep updating it after that. For the Dantooine Incursion I decided to skip this post, because I already had a lengthy article going over the event and the major perks of the patch, plus I knew I will have a complete Pirate Incursion Event Guide.

The Dantooine Incursion surprised me in a few small, but meaningful ways. So, I decided to make this. It’s called a review, but let me warn you while it’s early – it’s not a classic review article like a professional reviewer would do. This is a 7+ years old game after all and I have thousands of articles covering it.

With that cleared, let’s see the headlines!

THE SURPRISING NEW STORY ELEMENT

I had hoped that the Dantooine event will have some mini story related to the events on Ossus from last December. It brought more than that. We have a short, but interesting “filler” cinematic in which the Commander (better than “The Outlander”, but still… D’OH!) gathers his team for a report of the recent events.

The Republic and Empire have different scenes and based on which of the two factions you have decided to support, you will see different elements and dialogue.

The Republic players get to do an interview, while the Empire’s segment is giving you a chance to make a speech before the Imperial Army. In both cases you can influence what your character is saying. These short missions are likely not going to have a large impact, at least not in the short term, but they are vastly different based on your origins. It can be quite serious or very funny and you get to decide your own lines.

There is also a separate Pirate Incursion event intro mission! It leads you to Dantooine and introduces you to the current events. The two rivaling factions have different missions and objectives, leading, ultimately, to different approach to the situation on the ground.

Once again it matters what character you bring to Dantooine. If you have completed the Ossus Storyline, you will see a few unique dialogue moments. If you bring a low level character or a 70, who has not yet been to Ossus, you will see a more generic cinematic, just dealing with Dantooine and the Pirate Incursion on it, no references to Ossus, no special (!) characters appearing to talk to you.

THE EVENT ON DANTOOINE AND ITS IMPACT

The Pirate Incursion will last for two weeks with two separate Weekly missions back to back. The grind is slow, but not tedious. There are plenty of interesting things to do on the flat surface of the planet.

I tried to tell you a lot of things in the opening paragraph for this segment. Now, let’s expand them!

The event is going to last for two weeks. After that it will join the rest of the lineup as a recurring event on monthly basis and will start appearing for one week every month or so.

There are 12+ solo and group based missions on Dantooine. They are not all fetch quests. BioWare did well in their efforts to diversify the content and your objectives as best as they can. They have included various old and new systems – like the microbinoculars, driving a mouse droid or operating a turret, for example. The many hidden and standard achievements spice thins up even more.

Operating the Turret as a Republic supporter — Operating a Turret for the Republic!

If you pay a bit more attention to the missions and the text that we all usually just skip, you may get a better understanding of what exactly is going on. This is a bit more time consuming during your first run, but if you want to get the most out of the Dantooine story, this is a great way to do it.

Don’t forget to “stare into the far east”. Important Jedi Enclave Ruins lie there. The lore objects on Dantoone are very well-received too. I miss having lore objectives pop left and right as I explore a new region, like we have in the game’s original story leveling experience.

While the event is not active, you will still be able to go to Dantooine and do a few things. What exactly, I cannot tell you yet, because the event is still going at the time of this publication.

Community manager Eric Musco confirmed recently on Twitter that one of the achievements cannot be completed while the event is running. So, that’s one thing to look for for when the even is over. There are also two solo missions, that will be available once the event is gone.

The rewards from the Reputation vendor are nothing out of this (or any other) world, but some of them are definitely worth farming for. We don’t have enough currencies in SWTOR (/sarcasm), so yet another brand new one has been added, specifically to make you come back to the planet for more dailies!

THE TIMING OF THE UPDATE

BioWare had to push back the Dantooine Incursion’s release a week, because of a critical bug with the animations that needed to be fixed. Unfortunately another one managed to slide in.

A few hours after the launch, which was on time and without issues (Hurrah!), the servers had to go down for a very brief maintenance again. A bug was discovered that was causing a lot of lag for many players. It was related somehow to one of the new features – the Galactic Conquest change – making CXP and XP directly tied together. Because of that the change was reverted and will be introduced with a later patch.

Another thing that I am worried about with the timing is that we are approaching the middle of June already. BioWare promised a prequel storyline, leading up to Onslaught. So far we have only received the Jedi Under Siege and now the mini story cinematics with 5.10.3. This is not enough. I expected something at least of the quantity and quality of the Shadow of Revan prequel.

SWTOR 6.0 Spoils of War Circle of Life Graph — Onslaught’s Spoils of War is yet another brand new gearing system that we get to shape up and test on PTS!

The 6.0 expansion Onslaught is set to launch this September. BioWare already started talking about it with the first live stream and the reveal of Spoils of War.

PTS is opening soon and it will slowly get patched with more and more of the 6.0’s new features, starting in June with the aforementioned Spoils of War early testing phase.

Does that mean the story summaries (or fillers, as I called them earlier) we got with 5.10.3 are the final part before the Expansion! Hell, no! We need more. But there is no time.

I would not be surprised if Onslaught is pushed back to October, but with Jedi Fallen Order coming in November, I doubt EA will allow BioWare to delay the SWTOR expansion too much. Surely, they don’t want the two games to compete for the same audience. Yes, please, let’s be serious. They may be different genre games, but they are played by the same players – the Star Wars gamers.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I liked the Dantooine Incursion! I got more than what I expected. Granted, my expectations were quite low, but the update did manage to surprise me with more than a couple of things!

I didn’t mention the reworked intro cinematics to and from the classic SWTOR planets, because they are not much and don’t serve any meaningful purpose, but are pleasant surprise nonetheless!

It’s nice to see BioWare paying attention to old content and not just focusing on the new stuff and EndGame.

The Dantooine missions felt interesting and fun to me. This could be because I went deep into their stories. I am fully aware that most of us never read the text description of the dailies. I myself also used to skip them often in the past.

Blowing up the Rail Support Column — About to blow up that support column! I find it strange that I liked the explosion effects on Dantooine way more than other similar animations elsewhere. Did BioWare update something in that department of the game as well, I wonder.

The achievements are interesting and a little frustrating at the same time. The cooldown timers on some of the objects is ridiculously long.

BioWare focused all of our attention to the event on Dantooine. Right now I am having the hardest time remembering if and when did anybody from the devs or community staff mention the tiny bits of cinematic story we got.

If you have not checked Dantooine yet, go do that! The map is quite flat and not very imaginative, but then again so is the planet of Dantooine. I don’t get why can’t we explore the Enclave , but instead can only view it from a great distance.

Someone, I think it was Charles Boyd (creative director for SWTOR), mentioned once that the story may lead us to the enclave later on, but in my memory this feels more like a possibility rather than a hint at something that is coming.

I don’t know if it was because of my low expectations for this update’s contents outside of the Dantooine event, but BioWare left a positive impression in me with 5.10.3. I was preparing to get a small update with a new event in it. 5.10.4 has been confirmed and I will now have a higher expectations bar for it!

What about your experiences? Have you been to Dantooine in SWTOR yet? How do you like the soundtrack (I liked it!), the environment, the missions?

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